This half-formed rpg setting idea I got the other day. It could probably work with something D&Dish but might be better suited to something else. Anyway, the world that the players' would know and explore is a sort of mythic forest, a dark fairytale sort of woodland with no apparent beginning or end. Within the woodland are areas of human habitation, where everyone probably speaks the same language, and probably some enigmatic ruins, suggesting perhaps a once united human culture or series of cultures, but nothing like that exists in the present and nothing more than fables that hold any memory of it. Memory, like everything else, gets swallowed by the forest.
The woodland can be a strange place. There are dangers there, even horrors, but there are also places of beauty and enchantment. These last are perhaps hard to find again after visiting, though. Adventurers are wanderers in the wood, dealing with the things the forest brings them.
I envision it as something like an adult, darker Over the Garden Wall. Perhaps with a bit of Ravenloft with the forest replacing the Mists. The forest might give a similar uncanny vibe to the Zone in the film Stalker. Other inspirations: Grimm's fairytales and the film Company of Wolves. Maybe some stuff from the rpg Symbaroum though it's a bit less "Brother's Grimm meets Acid Western" than what I'm envisioning.
2 comments:
Sounds like Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood series. A fragment of primeval woodland in Britain, untouched since the ice age. The further in you go the bigger it gets, and the further back in time you go. It holds mythagos, or fragments of mythic archetypes like Robin Hood & Merlin, but different versions based in different times. Also Romans and Celts and ppre-celtic peoples.
Sounds a lot like Darkwood videogame to me, although that one is definitely more survival horror.
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